nd it out so
soon," said Sarah. "She does little but ride the pony and play around
with a gun. I don't believe she ever spun a hank o' yarn in her life.
She'll get her teeth cut by and by. Abe is right We're always dropping
our apples and feeling very bad about it, until we find out that there
are lots of apples just as good. I'm that way myself. I guess I've made
it harder for Samson crying over lost apples. I'm going to try to stop
it."

Then fell a moment of silence. Soon she said:

"There's a bitter wind blowing and there's no great hurry about the
rails, I guess. You sit here by the fire and read your book this
forenoon. Maybe it will help you to find your work."

So it happened that the events of Harry's morning found their place in
the diary which Sarah and Samson kept. Long afterward Harry added the
sentences about the razor.

That evening Harry read aloud from the _Life of Henry Clay_, while Sarah
and Samson sat listening by the fireside. It was the first of many
evenings which they spent in a like fashion that winter. When the book
was finished they read, on Abe's recommendation, Weem's _Life of
Washington_.

Every other Sunday they went down to the schoolhouse to hear John Cameron
preach. He was a working man, noted for good common sense, who talked
simply and often effectively of the temptations of the frontier, notably
those of drinking, gaming and swearing. One evening they went to a debate
in the tavern on the issues of the day, in which Abe won the praise of
all for an able presentation of the claim of Internal Improvements.
During that evening Alexander Ferguson declared that he would not cut his
hair until Henry Clay became president, the news of which resolution led
to a like insanity in others and an age of unexampled hairiness on that
part of the border.

For Samson and Sarah the most notable social event of the winter was a
chicken dinner at which they and Mr. and Mrs. James Rutledge and Ann and
Abe Lincoln and Dr. Allen were the guests of the Kelsos. That night Harry
stayed at home with the children.

Kelso was in his best mood.

"Come," he said, when dinner was ready. "Life is more than friendship. It
is partly meat."

"And mostly Kelso," said Dr. Allen.

"Ah, Doctor! Long life has made you as smooth as an old shilling and
nimbler than a sixpence," Kelso declared. "And, speaking of life,
Aristotle said that the learned and the unlearned were as the living and
the dead."

"It is tr